How will you make your number this year? (Part 2)

A new data-driven approach to finding the highest propensity-to-buy customers

In our last post, we talked about the challenges B2B tech companies face in identifying the right sales cycles they need to be in to meet their revenue goals, and a new data-driven approach we’ve developed to help solve that dilemma. Today we’re going to talk about one of our clients putting this approach to the test – with great results.

Sales target segmentation: 4 questions you need to ask

One of our B2B SaaS clients recently made a strategic decision to pursue the high end of its market, companies with more than $4B revenue. We conducted a deep dive assessment of these top accounts to identify patterns, trigger events and the conditions that existed for these companies to “raise their hand” and make a significant investment in our client’s solution. By performing quantitative and qualitative analysis of internal and external data, we were able to profile these accounts and group them into four market segments: Consumer-Facing, Resource Grab, Culture Change, and Aging Competitor Replacement.

By applying these four market segments to numerous private and public data sources (e.g., D&B, InsideView, etc.), we built a huge Fact-Base – the universe of potential accounts. We then ran this entire universe through our proprietary scoring model in order to prioritize the accounts. Ultimately, the model produced a list of 3,132 potential companies in the U.S., with a target list of 902 of these companies with the highest propensity-to-buy and highest revenue potential.

This target list was successfully used to determine the proper sales coverage model, focus the sales team on the right accounts, and help marketing focus its spend on engaging these specific customers. Marketing now runs campaigns designed for these specific segments and creates campaigns tailored to those buyers. Lead gen activities are now aligned with the segmentation scoring: higher priority accounts are touched more times.

The results are still coming in – but our client blew out its number last quarter, and is expected to exceed its revenue goals again this quarter. The forecast is full of the right accounts. Best of all, we gave the model to our client at the end of our engagement, and they are now using the process to pinpoint their best prospects in Australia, Japan, UK, Germany, Brazil and France.

Are you worried about making your revenue number this year? Want to accelerate long sales cycles? Need to steer reps away from low-value deals?  If so, we would welcome the opportunity to explore this data-driven, analytic approach to sales targeting at your company.